I got to see 2,000 miles of America from quite different perspectives.\u00a0 First from 30,000 feet above in four hours.\u00a0 Then from ground level.\u00a0 That took three days.<\/p>\n
Daughter Abby was moving home for a few weeks before starting grad school.\u00a0 She was driving her \u201996 Mercury Sable from San Jose, California to Sleepy Eye with as much of her stuff as it would hold plus Leo the cat.\u00a0 I flew out on Sunday and drove back with her on Monday to Wednesday.\u00a0 This was a journey that took settlers months, so coming or going was remarkable if you think about it.<\/p>\n
This is half of a continent, the emptier half as far as human beings go.\u00a0 But in the emptiness, it is often beautiful, sometimes breathtaking.<\/p>\n
On the flight out, I got a window seat just ahead of the wing.\u00a0 The fellow next to me looked like he would rather stick pins under his finger nails than have a conversation.\u00a0 It was mostly a clear day, so I spent the trip with my face pressed against the glass looking down.<\/p>\n
As you ascend from MSP heading west-southwest, below is green.\u00a0 Even from that height one can distinguish between corn and soybeans which dominate the landscape below.\u00a0 I found myself guessing which town that was down there, wishing towns had giant \u201cHello my name is\u201d labels stuck to them.<\/p>\n
Shades of lush green stretch to the horizon for about an hour, with swatches of blue in lakes and rivers.\u00a0 Much of it is divided into perfect mile squares, like some sort of game board.\u00a0 Remember that carving this up into 640-acre parcels happened before GPS and electronics which makes it more astounding.\u00a0 I assume I flew near my farm, and that a few of those little squares down there are mine to cultivate.<\/p>\n
In my part time job inspecting fields, I use plat books to find my way.\u00a0 I\u2019m used to thinking in terms of section squares.\u00a0 Roads being exactly a mile apart seem natural when you\u2019re driving in the country.\u00a0 Looking down on it from on high is another matter.<\/p>\n
There were puffy cumulous clouds.\u00a0 For each there was a shadow cast on the ground below it.\u00a0 Oddly, it felt sort of upside down being on the other side of the clouds looking at the shadow.<\/p>\n
Just the day before I had been working around and under wind generators out in western Minnesota.\u00a0 I shot video of them \u201cwhoosh, whooshing\u201d above me.\u00a0 When the plane went over the Buffalo Ridge, suddenly these huge machines were little toy models, spinning silently below me.<\/p>\n
Somewhere in South Dakota, the green dries up and is replaced by hues of brown and gray.\u00a0 Probably more so this year since the west has been in a drought.\u00a0 There are ribbons of green in river valleys.\u00a0 Then there are irrigation circles that look like round remnants of artificial turf.<\/p>\n
There are less roads and cities.\u00a0 When the hills turn into mountains, there are even fewer.\u00a0 It is difficult to discern the heights and depths of the mountains and valleys from that distance, but I assume it was rugged landscape I was going over.<\/p>\n
A day later, we began the trek home, reversing my four-hour flight.\u00a0 Out of California, we drove through the Sierra Nevadas.\u00a0 You cross the Donner Pass near Donner Lake and Donner Memorial State Park. It\u2019s odd that this small piece of history is so prominently memorialized.\u00a0 I told Abby that if things turned bad for us, we were eating the cat first.<\/p>\n
After those mountains come a lot of open spaces.\u00a0 Most of the drive across northern Nevada is through the Great Basin. This is called a \u201ccold desert,\u201d hot in the summer and cold in the winter.\u00a0 It was over 100 degrees outside the car, and a little less inside our old car with iffy air conditioning.\u00a0 Nevada was endless brown hills, interspersed with casinos.\u00a0 Every small town had a casino or two.\u00a0 It seemed there are more casinos than people.<\/p>\n
That was followed by the Salt Flats of Utah, shimmering white, looking deceptively like water in the distance.\u00a0 Past the Great Salt Lake, Salt Lake City sets between mountain ranges.\u00a0 We had lunch there and would have liked more time.\u00a0 I marked it as a city to go back to.<\/p>\n
On the border of Utah and Wyoming, we had car trouble.\u00a0 We spent a morning In Wendover, Utah trying to get that resolved.\u00a0 We described that as a cross between being in an episode of the Twilight Zone and a Monty Python skit, but we were going by noon.<\/p>\n
Wyoming is buttes and plateaus, with badlands coloring parts of it.\u00a0 Here and there are herds of cattle when slight amounts of green would appear.\u00a0 We turned off the interstate and took two lane road up toward South Dakota, spending an evening driving through ranch country watching an entrancing thunderstorm off in the distance.<\/p>\n
A lot of the West is defined much by what it doesn\u2019t have: rainfall.\u00a0 Green doesn\u2019t reappear until well into South Dakota. We take growing things for granted.\u00a0 I remember when my father who never got off the farm much for his first 60 years came back from a bus tour out west.\u00a0 He was struck by how much land there was that didn\u2019t grow anything.\u00a0 We teased him about that, but gosh, he was right.<\/p>\n
There are not a lot of cities on the way: Reno, Salt Lake City, Sioux Falls.\u00a0 We went through the least populated county (Niobrara) in the least populated state (Wyoming).<\/p>\n
What towns there were had long distances between them.\u00a0 They were not unlike the small towns of Minnesota with a lot of things that used to be.\u00a0 We saw closed gas stations and empty schools.\u00a0 One town had five closed motels.\u00a0 Out in the country, there were old farm and ranch buildings scattered along the road, well preserved in the dry climate for decades.\u00a0 These were rural places, and rural places everywhere are changing and adapting in the best cases and simply declining in the worst.<\/p>\n
As I said, much of it was beautiful, an evolving watercolor painting out our car window.\u00a0 I thought of the Woody Guthrie song, This Land Is Your Land.\u00a0 We saw half of \u201cfrom California, to the New York Island.\u201d\u00a0 And if it is so that \u201cthis land is made for you and me,\u201d America is truly blessed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I got to see 2,000 miles of America from quite different perspectives.\u00a0 First from 30,000 feet above in four hours.\u00a0 Then from ground level.\u00a0 That took three days. Daughter Abby was moving home for a few weeks before starting grad school.\u00a0 She was driving her \u201996 Mercury Sable from San Jose, California to Sleepy Eye …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[162],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-96765","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-weeds-by-randy-krzmarzick"],"aioseo_notices":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-22 20:44:35","action":"change-status","newStatus":"trash","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96765","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=96765"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96765\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":96766,"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96765\/revisions\/96766"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=96765"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=96765"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=96765"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}